Step 2: Setup the development envirionment

I had to setup my VM and install all packages that are required to build Android ICS from scratch. There are really good installation instructions on source.android.com.

Step 3: Get the source, Luke

I just had to follow the download instructions on the Android Open Source web site to get the source of the Android platform version I wanted to build.

Note: The download with „repo sync“ fininshed sometimes with „out of memory“ errors. Increasing the memory of the Ubuntu VM to 3GB helped to fix this problem.

Note 2: Because I use Ubuntu 11.10 I can only build the master branch for some reasons, so I had to initialize the repository using „repo init -b master“

Step 4: Build

Building everything is quite easy done with „make“. I used „make -j2“ to build 2 jobs parallel. This took quite a long time. I didn’t measure the time. The build stopped again with linker errors due to out of memory errors. I decreased the memory for the VM meantime because I wanted to do other tasks during the build. Setting the memory to 2.5GB helped to fix this problem again.

Step 5: Run the emulator

Finally I got a complete Android 4.0.3 full build that runs in the emulator. I didn’t want to build for a device for the first time.

Thats it so far. It was really easy to build everything from scratch but now I have to try to get it onto a real device…